Winding down through the tenement-house gloom, Great Taylor was not without fear.  Her footfall on the uncarpeted landings and iron treads sounded hollow and strangely loud.  The odours that in the past had greeted her familiarly, making known absorbing domestic details of her neighbours, caused her neither to pause nor to sniff.  She reached the narrow entrance hall, dark and deserted, and, hurrying down its length, fumbled with the knob and pulled open the street door.  Dazzling sunlight, a blast of warm air and the confused clatter of the sidewalk engulfed her.  She stood vacillating in the doorway, thinly panoplied for the struggle of existence.  Her body was splendid, it is true, but her spirit was small.  Despite the sunlight and warmth she was trembling.  And yet, for years she had gone down into this street confident of herself, mingling on equal terms with its wayfarers, her ear catching and translating the sounds that, converging, caused this babel.  Now, suddenly, all of it was meaningless, the peddlers with whom she had bickered and bargained in a loud voice with gestures, breast to breast, were strangers and the street an alien land.  Many things seemed to have passed backward out of her life.  She was no longer Grit’s wife, no longer the Great Taylor of yesterday.  She was something new-born, free of will; all the old ties had been clipped.  She could do as she pleased.  No one could stop her.  And she pleased to become a denizen of a world which, though just around the corner, was unrelated to the sphere in which she had moved.

“What’s the matter with me?” she asked herself.  “Nothing to be afraid of.  He’s gone.  I’ll do as I please.”  With such assertions she bolstered her courage, but nevertheless she was trembling....

Glossy-haired women jostled her with their baskets.  Taller by a head, Nell pushed her way oblivious of the crowd.  At the corner she paused.  “I ain’t going to be early.”  A clock across the avenue, visible beneath the reverberating ironwork of the elevated, seemed to have stopped at the half hour.  It was four thirty.  She watched the long hand until it moved jerkily.  A policeman, half dragging a shrieking woman and followed by a jostling, silent crowd, swept Great Taylor aside and put in a call for the wagon.

She hurriedly rounded the corner and passed a window that displayed a pyramid of varnished kegs backed by a mirror with a ram’s head painted on it in colours.  Beyond was the side entrance.  Over the door hung a glass sign, one word in large red letters:  “DANCING.”  She caught the odour of cheap wine and stale beer.  Again she said, “I ain’t going to be early,” and moved away aimlessly.